John Dos Passos

For much of the 1980s, beginning when I was in college, I used to read a Hemingway book a year. The point was not self-improvement but rather a kind of exploration: What was it, exactly, about his writing that I'd missed? I had read "The Sun Also Rises" in high school and had admired its spare portrayal of 1920s expatriate life. But I'd also thought of it as more than a little stilted, even melodramatic in its way.

Of all the great American between-the-wars writers — "the three kings," as Richard Ford referred to Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald in a 1983 essay, although I'd also include John Dos Passos in their company — the one who most spoke to me was...

Related "John Dos Passos" Articles

For much of the 1980s, beginning when I was in college, I used to read a Hemingway book a year. The point was not self-improvement but rather a kind of exploration: What was it, exactly, about his writing that I'd missed? I had read "The Sun Also Rises"...